Brad Pitt On Getting Older And The "Natural Evolution" Of Fatherhood

Brad Pitt's role aging in reverse in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which opened on Christmas Day, has led to interviews in which the recently-turned 45-year old talks about his own aging process and the happy settling that has occurred in recent years, including partnering with Angelina Jolie and the "natural evolution" of having six (and counting) kids.

"Once you hit 40, you start reexamining the math of it all. I'll trade wisdom for youth any day," Pitt told the LA Times.

"It's a tragedy in the sense that any love involves loss, and that's the risk you take," Pitt responds. "And the greater the love, the greater the loss. I certainly feel that now with the woman I'm with, and the children that I have. But whatever the course may be, this time together is extraordinary..."

"I had a whole other life and I got to experience a lot. And I probably got away with more than I should," he says. "And it kind of ran its course, you know, it kind of hit a dead end." Fatherhood, he notes, is "the direction I always thought I would go in. But not until, with Angie and it felt like a natural evolution, a natural direction."

And Pitt, who was in Chicago on Election Night to tape an Oprah episode the next day, went to Grant Park that night is optimistic for the Obama administration:

Pitt says, he won't be sorry to see the current White House administration exiting stage left. But he thinks it would be premature to start writing a national obit.

"America's known for our ingenuity," he says. "We put a man on the moon, for Christ's sake. And it'd be a shame to lose that definition because of some kind of fear of losing what we were, or what we had. That's the quickest way, I think, to end it all. We're going to be all right."

Pitt's film opened strong, but was beaten at the box office on Christmas Day by "Marley & Me."